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| Mikaela Bradbury. |
I recently heard Dan Costa, the national program director for the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Air, Climate, and Energy Research Program, refer to the word "climate change" as being like the word "stuff": it's an all-encompassing, somewhat opaque term that can potentially leave you feeling overwhelmed and misplaced in how to tackle it. He was speaking at the 2017 Yale Environmental Sustainability Summit as part of a panel about the impacts of climate change on public health, and I had the opportunity to meet with him earlier as part of a private lunch offered to student associates of Yale's Climate Change and Health Initiative.
In this more intimate setting, Costa alluded to some of the linguistic tactics he employs in communicating and deploying his research on the adverse effects of air pollution on human health, some of which includes looking at the shared causes and compounding effects of climate change. In equating "climate change" with the word "stuff," he was suggesting that it would be more effective to break up the issue into its various facets, such as air pollution, and target it more discretely, both as a way to rouse public awareness and engagement and avoid the political charge of the term. In other words, not only is "climate change" like a pile of stuff that we don’t know how to approach, it has become like a pile of toxic waste, politically and in some places socially. Therefore, Costa introduced the term "environmental futures" as another type of designator for man-made weather changes. While "environmental futures" may inoculate against some of the political radioactivity of the word "climate change," it certainly doesn’t solve the problem of obfuscation. Thankfully, he merely used it as an entry point into a more targeted discussion.
Read Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs story by Mikaela Bradbury - “Climate Change Might Give Your Grandfather a Heart Attack: Changing Public Perception to Drive Action.”
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